Harold Meyerson

Recent Articles

This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . For conservatives, the much-anticipated Supreme Court decision in the Janus v. AFSCME case may be coming eight years too late. If, as expected, the five Republican justices on the Court rule for the plaintiff, which would end public employee unions’ ability to collect dues from all the workers they represent, they will significantly weaken the nation’s largest unions, among them the two teachers unions, as well as AFSCME and SEIU. These are also among the most significant organizations in Democrats’ voter-mobilization programs and, more generally, in supporting progressive groups and causes. Even more fundamentally, the right plainly hopes such a ruling will also drive the final nail into the coffin of the American labor movement. While a pro- Janus ruling could strengthen the Republicans electorally, when it comes to killing unions, the right is simply too late. The...

By the normal standards of U.S. national security, the government’s ruling on Tuesday to delay and potentially derail the acquisition of high-tech company Qualcomm by the Singaporean company Broadcom was startlingly smart and gobsmackingly wonderful. It was smart because it extended its definition of U.S. security interests to maintaining our advantage in the development of the most advanced forms of technology, in this case, the 5G communications systems that will be critical to both driverless cars and network security in coming decades. The government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS for short) wrote that it feared that if Qualcomm, the nation’s leading developer of 5G technology, were purchased by Broadcom, its research would suffer and a Chinese high-tech company, Huawei, would likely surge past it to become the global leader in security technology. In the past, CFIUS has blocked several Huawei attempts to purchase U.S. tech...

This article originally appeared at The Los Angeles Times . Subscribe here . Last week, Libby Schaaf, mayor of Oakland, took the logic of so-called sanctuary cities and states one step further by warning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had planned a raid on immigrants in the country illegally. Over the weekend, roughly 150 immigrants were apprehended in Northern California. Predictably, the backlash from Trump supporters, immigrant haters, and ICE authorities has been intense. Was Schaaf impeding law enforcement? What was she thinking? It was probably a good deal like what the leaders of pre-Civil War Northern cities and states were thinking when they resisted the federal government's efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, which a Southern-dominated Congress had enacted in 1850. In case you don't remember your U.S. history : An 1842 court ruling absolved states of any duty to cooperate in the recapture of former slaves who'd freed themselves by fleeing to the North. In...

It may still be going on, this first Trump State of the Union. Surely, there are people in the gallery he hasn’t introduced yet. And has he finished talking about MS-13? That was the second longest part of his speech, second only to taking credit for the economy. (Having become president in Year Seven of the recovery, Trump taking credit calls to mind Ann Richards’s line about George H.W. Bush: “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”) SOTUs should be watched closely to discover what it is that the president thinks Americans should fear, or at least cast a watchful eye on. Trump devoted one sentence to Russia and China. Not one sentence each; one sentence for them both. ISIS drew a couple of minutes. MS-13 probably took up around eight minutes. Plainly a greater threat than the spread of Chinese authoritarianism or Russian anti-liberalism, not to mention climate change, which, in fact, Trump didn’t mention. Inflating MS-13 to the status of...

In the front section of the print edition of today’s New York Times —on page A13 in the version printed for the Washington, D.C., area, and for all I know, in other areas, too—a full-page ad appears with the headline “Censure Donald Trump.” Beneath the headline are 34 grounds for censure that the 57,000 signatories to this campaign are telling Congress are more than sufficient cause for the House and Senate to pass censure resolutions condemning the president. At the bottom the page, readers are directed to a website— www.censuredonaldtrump.com —where they can add their names to the petition. In the current political climate, censure is something of a halfway house between impeachment—which only a fraction of Democratic senators and representatives support, fearing it would both eclipse all other battles and energize the right—and the individual statements of indignation that legislators are regularly compelled to issue in response...